You are responsible for getting your ideas to spread. How can you do this more effectively? The first step is to connect ideas creatively – this is the fundamental creative act in innovation. Here are some thoughts on this from Noam Chomsky, discussing the role of education in an excellent post from Maria Popova: You […]
There’s so much information around these days, how can we possibly deal with it all? Many of us are overwhelmed just by our email, so when you add in everything else (TV, books, newspapers, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.), it’s just too much. And yet, we’ve always been faced with more information than we’re capable of […]
I ran across an outstanding post today by John Battelle reviewing Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.by Steven Johnson. It’s one of my favourite books from the last couple of years, and Battelle does a great job of highlighting the key points in it. He also reminded me of a table […]
The size of your inbox or your RSS feed or your twitter stream might all argue otherwise, but there’s no such thing as information overload. Or, at least, if there is, it’s not new. Check this out: As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can […]
Why does your firm exist? To maximize shareholder value? No – that’s the dumbest idea in the world. To reduce transaction costs? No – that’s another economic model that doesn’t have much grounding in reality. In fact, if you ask this of most firms, they don’t have a very good answer. There have been a […]
Innovation is the process of idea management. This means that to innovate effectively you need to have great ideas, select the best ones and execute them, and then get those executed ideas to spread. All three steps are interdependent, and you need to be good at all three to innovate effectively. Today I’m interested in […]
Haruki Murakami is one of my favourite authors, and in reading a couple of his books recently, I ran across several quotes made me think about innovation. In large part, this is because nearly everything I encounter makes me think about innovation one or another. Nevertheless, here are four thoughts triggered by Murakami. The first […]
Are you creating something new or replacing something that’s already there? If you’re replacing, you need to do much different things than if you’re creating something new. Every time you try to get your ideas to spread, you have to break connections. This is a lot harder if you’re trying to replace a deeply embedded […]
Every time you use wi-fi, bluetooth, a cordless phone (including mobiles), GPS or anything with an RFID tag, you’re using a technology called spread spectrum radio. The first version of spread spectrum was invented during World War II as a method for controlling torpedos using rapidly changing radio frequency to control their direction in a […]
